


Downhill

by Lochinvar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Attempt at Humor, BAMF Dean Winchester, BAMF John Winchester, BAMF Sam Winchester, Brotherly Angst, Brotherly Love, Canon-Typical Violence, Curtain Fic, Darts, Dean is a Good Cook, Falling In Love, Fluffy Ending, Gardener Dean, Good Parent John, Growing Old Together, Happy Ending, Hunter Training, Knives, M/M, Mechanic Dean Winchester, Men of Letters Bunker, Men of Letters Mentioned, Mention of sexual predators, Nerd Sam, No Sex, No Smut, Post-Canon, Post-Hunting, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Protective Dean Winchester, Puberty, Scholar Sam, Teenage Drama, Teenage Hormones, Wincest Implied, brothers in love, brothers kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9100693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lochinvar/pseuds/Lochinvar
Summary: Puberty hit Sam like an avalanche. But were he and Dean ready? Rated Teen for mentions of violence, potential sexual predators, and brothers in love, but nothing explicit. Dean gets drunk, once.I own nothing; rely on the kindness of strangers.Dedicated to Fenix21, my guru regarding the sweet love between the boys





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Always grateful for kudos and comments.

Fourteen-year-old Sam Winchester, hunched over the table at the public library, looked up from reading his book, a well-worn copy of a biography of Winston Churchill, and saw his 18-year-old brother Dean standing over him, really saw him, for the first time.

Teenage hormones are like triple towing down Donners Pass in a blizzard, for the first time, meaning a big surprise for the neophyte driver, but not for the seasoned long haulers, hunkering down in their tricked out cabs with the heat notched up full blast and watching the road as if it’s going to rear up and chow them down.

After all, it is California, not Colorado where high country passes lace across the spine of the Rocky Mountains and the sub-ranges. Locals make jokes about Monument Hill on innocent-seeming Interstate 25. On either side, the southern Denver metroplex and Colorado Springs north could have sunshine and palm trees, but Monument will be blinded by blizzards that jackknife tractor-trailers up from the Mexican border. Predictable.

Just like teenage hormones.

And California is not the ragged White Mountains of New Hampshire, where pre-colonial ghosts wail in the clotted-cream fog rising from hidden ponds and smothering roads, and unnamed entities spear the valleys with lightning and slice open the black night as if wielding angel blades.

Even seasoned Hunters avoid the Granite State. Live free or die, indeed. The supernatural revel in the winds that dance around Mt. Washington fueled by portals to Hell and Purgatory, swarming like murders of crows somersaulting in spring thermals.

Just like teenage hormones.

But California? That’s deserts and beaches, hilly vineyards and ocean-cooled strawberry fields. Sentinel redwoods, as silent as reapers, waiting for the end of the world. Sure, it has its high passes and mountain ranges. And there is Mt. Shasta, which even clueless civilians grok as a hot spot for supernatural activity.

(Castiel seems to know something about the Lemurians, but the angel ain’t talking.)

But, if you’re driving on Interstate 80 through the Sierra Nevada range east towards Truckee, you can be fooled. So much traffic. A major highway. It must be safe, right?

We are talking about teenage hormones, remember?

So, being fourteen years old can be exactly like finding yourself on a mountain pass during a sudden blizzard in a winter that already has dumped 700 inches of snow and counting. Still, you think you’re doing okay, and then, you hit the cusp of the pass, and gravity kicks in, and your brakes grind, and your tires are slick with ice, and all you can do is steer and pray.

Sam’s brakes failed.

\----------

Eighteen-year-old Dean was the same Dean he was yesterday and the day before that. Tall for his age, with the confident stance of a well-trained athlete (a result of good genes and his dad’s version of Marine Corps boot camp): muscles moving catlike under a well-worn band tee and grunge-era flannel plaid and toned bowlegs encased in unintentionally fashionable ripped jeans.

His face, as a high school history teacher once remarked to a friend over several shots of tequila after school, like that of a Celtic godling, if their godlings had freckles, perfect jawlines, and green eyes.

Once upon a time (meaning three hours ago, when Dean had left Sam off at the public library while he and their father John covertly interviewed witnesses at the local Dew Drop Inn Bar and Burger community watering hole), Dean was Dean.

From Sam’s point of view Dean had evolved from the bedrock of a life filled with uncertainty–strong arms to hold him close in cold, strange, scary motel rooms and always able to find one more bowl of Lucky Charms or mac and cheese to satisfy an empty tummy–to the focus of not unjustified hero worship–watching him shoot bulls-eyes on the targets Uncle Bobby Singer pinned to the sides of waterlogged (and therefore worthless) hay bales and face off an angry ghost at age 15–to an increasingly annoying prankster–soap in his toothpaste, shorted sheets, and embarrassing nicknames in front of new friends–who found fault and humor in pretty much everything his younger brother did and said.

Sammy knew better than to complain directly to his father, but Uncle Bobby, Pastor Jim, and any other sympathetic adult Hunters he collided with got an earful.

The men (and occasional woman, but Sam tended to be shy with females of any age) understood. Dean could be arrogant and, at times, even a bit of a bully, mimicking some of the more unpleasant facets of John’s character. Young Sammy, with his puppy-like devotion, was an easy target.

But it was complicated. Dean’s motivation to become a damn good hunter came from three all-encompassing desires: to please his father (despite his unachievable demands), to avenge his mother’s death, and, perhaps most importantly, to protect Sammy.

Dean’s taunts and pranks were his lame attempts to toughen up his younger brother as his father had done to him.

Of course, Chuck forgive the monster or human who looked crosswise at his little brother. As if Sammy were some kind of baby, his older brother would hover in truck stop bathrooms, making his floppy-haired younger brother use the stall with the door.

Dean would stand guard, stone-faced, arms crossed over his chest.

But there were the men who locked the bathroom door and tried to approach Dean or get to Sam through him, sometimes with a knife in hand, sometimes with a creased wad of money that they held out like a different sort of weapon. They’d be lucky if they escaped with broken fingers.

(Dean still would take their money as payment for his trouble.)

And Chuck could not help if John got wind of the intentions of overconfident human predators who went after either of his boys, especially the kind that would not take no for an answer.

The knife that a stalker brought along to intimidate his prey would end up buried hilt-deep in his own shoulder.

The angle made it difficult to explain to the emergency room resident and the cop on shared duty at 3 am.

“I fell on it,” the stalker would say, refusing to elaborate to skeptical medical and law enforcement professionals who had seen it all.

(The wounded might not know exactly who or what a Hunter was, but there were rumors. And the young brothers had enough fond surrogate Hunter uncles and aunts that, if word got out, well, not everyone in the Hunter community followed the Code regarding the killing of human beings. Okay, so they would just hurt them a little. And scare them up to the toes-over-the-edge-of-Niagara-Falls terrifying.)

But, the earth shifted and the road dropped. Just like teenage hormones.

And Dean changed.

\----------

All Sam wanted to do was to tell Dean about Winston Churchill being this amazing man who saved the world, like Dean and Dad and the other Hunters did, like Sam was learning to do, except the Englishman saved the entire world and wrote books and, get this, kept a sense of Honor. He had to do bad things to good people, but he talked about the importance of doing the right thing even when the times were bad.

Sam was filled with the nerdy glow, the pure happiness of Learning Something Important and New. And he was so excited that he might have found something in one of his Big Brain Books, which Dean usually mocked, that would make Dean happy, too. Smile in surprise and approval. Ask Sam to tell him more.

Sam looked up at this brother and said his name. At the same moment Puberty walked in and punched him in the jaw.

And two things happened.

The smart, mouthy boy who given the chance never stopped talking about, well, everything, and who despite the innate shyness of the new kid in school would expound on, well, everything, was silent.

Sam fell in love as swiftly as a runaway tractor-trailer can flip over in heavy, wet spring snow. Love that was already in place, built on dry cedar shavings and fatwood, waiting for the match.

Immediately, Sam was on fire: cheeks flaming, breath quickening, a disobedient cock chubbing in his hand-me-down jeans, punching up against the tight denim he was already outgrowing, rough through thin, worn briefs.

His eyes were tearing up, his body responding to the flight-and-fight response of too many conflicting chemicals. It was the Serengeti, and Dean was a leopard. And Sam was an antelope. Or a leopard. Or a pizza. Or a burger. Or Dean was the burger. It was so confusing. Worse than being in the field watching his father and Dean take down a werewolf, knowing some day that it would be his turn.

And how could his mouth be so dry? Sam’s heart was pounding, and now he understood what it meant to feel possessed. He couldn’t have stood up if his life depended on it, his knees were shaking so hard, as were his hands, which had dropped the book on the public library table.

How could Dean not notice?

Because, the second thing that happened is that something also happened to his older brother.

\----------

For Dean, it was as if someone had turned a spotlight on his brother, a light only he could see. Sammy, his skinny, weird little brother who broke Dean’s heart every day because the younger boy was so smart and damn pure and decent and needed a 24-hour armed guard to protect him from everything. Who deserved a better life, like a royal changeling snatched from his crib at birth and placed in the hands of peasants, until his true heritage could be revealed. Who hated the road and the murderous Hunter’s life, but was a natural with research and could throw a knife better than Dean or John or Bobby.

Suddenly, Dean’s skin burned, and his body pulsed. He wanted to attack Sammy, capture him, and take him away. His vision dimmed for a moment; he felt like he had been poisoned. It was like the rush of a hunt, but better and worse at the same time.

Dean already knew about teenage hormones and had tobogganed down his own hill, more than once. Slid to the bottom and ran back up to the top to plummet down again, more than once. But this was different. It was Sammy, not some pretty girl smelling of strawberry shampoo, all soft breasts and thighs.

When Sammy woke up, Dean woke up, too.

\-------

Some versions of this tale say that the brothers fell into each other’s arms and kept up their affair until Sam left for Stanford, hiding the truth from John and the Hunter community the whole time (but their father and Bobby had their suspicions). That Dean then would sneak off to Stanford and they would have their way with each other. And then, after they were reunited they lived happily ever after, despite a seemingly never-ending, melodramatic chain of catastrophes.

But the story the brothers told decades later, holding hands on the backyard deck Dean built for them to catch the evening sun, was that it was chemistry, for sure, but the time and place were wrong.

It was teenage hormones, powerful stuff, but which turned out to be chemistry, after all. Chemicals. Not meant to be. At least, not then.

That day, Dean mumbled his way out the front door of the library, and left Sam, who cried for 30 minutes, put away the Churchill biography, and walked the two miles back to the motel, alone.

Dean drove to a bar, drank four beers on an empty stomach, threw up in the alley, and walked across the street to the motel, alone. His version of cathartic tears. And that was it.

Sam threw himself into studying; Dean worked on his hunting skills. They fought more. Then Sam ran away to Stanford.

\--------

Most people, when they drive over Donners Pass the first time and if the weather is bad, will stop in Truckee for hot coffee and a donut. They think, wow, that was interesting. Or scary. Or spectacular, even, but they get back in their rigs and keep driving east. Back to work. Back to school. Back home. Or, they turn around and drive west over the pass towards Sacramento, and now they know the road. It is not the same thrill as the first time.

\--------

Decades later, when their hair had begun to frost, Dean came into the library at the bunker and found Sam hunched over the map table. His brother started to expound on something he found in the book he was reading. His fox-slanted eyes were lit up with excitement, and he was telling Dean something very very important, something he thought Dean would think was cool and smile about. Something about Celtic godlings.

Dean walked over to see what Sam was nerding about, a fond look on his face, and he looked down at Sam, bent over his book, and suddenly, Dean inhaled the scent of Sam’s shampoo. They had stopped getting different soaps and such years before, but Sam always smelled like Sam, like herbs and sunshine. And, suddenly, there it was. Dean kissed his younger brother on the top of his head, and when Sam looked up and finally–finally–stopped talking, Dean kissed him on the lips. The most matter-of-fact moment of his life.

Sam moved into Dean’s room that night, and a year later they moved out of the bunker, leaving it to a younger commune of Hunters and American Men and Women of Letters. The lines were becoming blurred, which everyone except the stuffiest of the British MOL cohort thought was a good thing.

Found the house in Colorado not far from Denver, near grasslands under a sky so blue and clear that Dean was sure he could see Heaven when the light was right. Sam became a Men of Letters Emeritus, hosting visiting scholars and Hunters who would contact him and Dean for theory and advice. The younger brother still practiced with his throwing knives, to the delight of neighborhood children and their parents. The kids knew to stay behind the makeshift barrier Dean assembled from rope and barrels.

Sam’s skills with a blade also translated into a reliable income stream, extracted from strangers who challenged him at games of darts in the brothers’ favorite pub. (Some folks drove from other states to test his reputation, because they could not accept the fact that the tall scholarly man with the shoulder-length hair shot with silver was that good. He really was.)

Dean gardened, cooked, and generally pampered his beloved Sammy. He also made better than decent money restoring classic cars. Sometimes, he would pat the Impala’s roof and tell her not to be jealous, that she was his favorite, then wink at his brother.

And when they took Baby out for a spin on a sunny day, letting her lengthen her stride east on the straightaways of US 36 or I-70, windows down, Bob Seger singing, the brothers singing along, Sammy’s hand resting on the back of Dean’s neck, it was better than teenage hormones.

It was the familiar road. Desire tamped to a slow burn that kept them warm every night and every day. It was decades of shared adventures, fights, emotions raw and bitter, reconciliations and damnation and salvation. It was love earned. It was love.


End file.
